From Help Scout

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The Help Scout ticket importer in workspace settings

Overview

Use the Help Scout importer to move a fixed snapshot of historical email conversations into one or more email channels in There There. The importer reads directly from Help Scout with temporary application credentials, so you do not need to prepare an export.

The import is silent. It does not email contacts, notify your team, or run workflows. Imported open tickets behave like regular open tickets after the import finishes.

Looking for HelpSpot instead? That is a different product. See From HelpSpot.

Find the Help Scout importer

The importer is available to workspace administrators when ticket importing is enabled for the workspace.

Open the workspace into which you want to import the conversations.
Open Workspace settings.
Under Admin, choose Import tickets.
Select Help Scout.

If Import tickets does not appear, make sure you are a workspace administrator and that ticket importing is enabled for your workspace.

Create a Help Scout application

Help Scout uses OAuth application credentials rather than a permanent API key, so there is nothing to configure on your server.

In Help Scout, open Your Profile, then choose My apps.
Choose Create My App and give it a name such as There There import.
Help Scout requires a redirection URL, but the importer uses the Client Credentials flow and never uses it. Enter a placeholder such as https://there-there.app.
Create the application and copy the App ID and App Secret.

Paste both values into the importer. Do not add them to your server environment.

My apps lives under your personal profile, so the application can reach every inbox your Help Scout account can see. If Create My App is missing, check that your Help Scout role allows creating applications.

Choose Verify connection before setting up the import. There There exchanges the credentials for a token, confirms the account they belong to, and fetches every reachable inbox. If the credentials are wrong or no inbox is reachable, the form says so and no draft or import is created. After verification, the credentials are locked until you choose Use different Help Scout account.

Choose where conversations land

Map every Help Scout inbox to an active email channel in There There. Each inbox can use a different channel, and several Help Scout inboxes can use the same There There channel. The import cannot start until every inbox has a destination. You can still save an incomplete draft, including when the workspace does not have an email channel yet.

There There fetches the Help Scout inbox list again when the import starts. If an inbox was added or removed after verification, the import stays as a draft, keeps mappings for inboxes that still exist, and asks you to review the changed list. Renaming an inbox keeps its mapping because the Help Scout inbox ID did not change.

Choose Import all tickets as closed for an archive-only migration. Leave it off to preserve Help Scout statuses, which means imported open conversations become active tickets in There There.

When the run starts, There There fixes a cutoff time and the verified inbox IDs. The run imports only conversations from those inboxes that were created on or before the cutoff, and ignores any thread created after it, so activity during the migration cannot change the scope.

Start with a trial import

To inspect the result before migrating everything, choose Just a sample and enter how many tickets to bring over. A sampled import uses real Help Scout data and takes the newest conversations first, so you see recent, representative tickets.

Choose Everything for the full migration, which works through your conversations oldest first. Only one ticket import can run in a workspace at a time.

Running the import again never duplicates conversations that are already here, so the usual path is a small sample first, then Everything. Conversations already imported are recognised and skipped, and any messages that were missing are added to the existing ticket.

The sample limit applies across all mapped inboxes together. It is not applied once per inbox.

What gets imported

The importer reads published email conversations created on or before the cutoff, from every inbox the application can reach. For each conversation, There There imports:

the subject and original creation and closure times;
the customer as the ticket contact, and the assigned agent when their email matches a workspace member who can access the destination channel;
every published message and private note in chronological order;
forwarded conversations, folded into the ticket they were forwarded from;
sender details and To, CC, and BCC recipients;
Help Scout tags;
attachments and images pasted into a message body.

Unless you choose to import all tickets as closed, Help Scout active and open map to Open, pending maps to Waiting, closed maps to Closed, and spam maps to Spam.

Chat and phone conversations are not imported, and neither are drafts, bounced messages, or threads Help Scout is holding for review. These are skipped silently rather than reported as problems, because they are not email history.

Contacts are matched by email inside the workspace. When Help Scout provides no customer on the conversation, the importer falls back to the sender of the earliest inbound message. A conversation with no usable customer email is reported in the warnings CSV rather than guessed at.

An assigned agent who cannot access the destination channel is left unassigned rather than given access, so the import cannot widen anybody's permissions.

Attachments and inline images

Attachments must pass There There's normal file safety checks and may be at most 10 MiB each. Files that are unavailable, unsafe, unsupported, or over the limit are skipped without failing the ticket.

Images pasted into a message body are treated separately, because Help Scout serves them from its own content network rather than listing them as attachments. There There copies each one and rewrites the message to point at the stored copy, so imported conversations keep rendering after you close your Help Scout account. Images hosted anywhere else, such as tracking pixels and signature logos on third-party domains, are left untouched and never fetched.

Warning reference

The warnings CSV includes a code that identifies what happened:

Code	Meaning and import outcome
`helpscout_attachment_download_failed`	An attachment was listed but could not be retrieved from Help Scout. That attachment was skipped and the rest of the conversation was imported.
`helpscout_conversation_import_failed`	The individual conversation could not be mapped or stored. The CSV exports this row with `level` set to `failed`, and the remaining import continues.
`helpscout_mailbox_mapping_missing`	The conversation had no usable inbox ID or referred to an inbox that was not mapped. The conversation was skipped and the remaining import continues.

Monitor and cancel

The recent imports section shows progress, counters, warnings, and any Help Scout rate-limit wait. When Help Scout asks the importer to slow down, the run remains Processing, displays the next retry time, and continues automatically.

One conversation or attachment can fail without undoing successfully imported records. Download the warnings CSV to see which Help Scout conversation or attachment was affected.

You can cancel an active run. Work that was already committed remains available, and queued work stops safely.

A Help Scout import cannot be resumed. To continue after a failure or a cancellation, start a new import. The new run gets a new cutoff and picks up conversations created since the first one, and because already imported conversations are recognised, nothing is duplicated.

The credentials are encrypted only while an active run needs them. There There never shows them again and purges them when the run completes, fails, or is cancelled, and when you delete a saved draft. After the migration reaches a terminal state, delete the application in Help Scout under My apps.